Nintendo Battles Makers of the R4

eldavojohn writes "A neat little device called the R4 allows for homebrew on the DS ... and as micro SD prices fall, it is becoming easier and easier to put on these cartridges binary dumps of games people don't have the right to play. Which is why Nintendo will see them in court. Note, it's not just the console maker pressing charges, it's also Capcom, Koei, Square Enix, Tecmo, Bandai Namco, and Sega. Is this truly a case of fighting piracy, or is it also an attempt to stop homebrew from stealing the market?"

Comments

Well, that's an easy one to answer

[Goaway]

Is this truly a case of fighting piracy, or is it also an attempt to stop homebrew from stealing the market?"

It is truly a case of fighting piracy. Anybody who thinks otherwise is severely delusional.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[Spykk]

While I do believe that the primary goal is to fight piracy, these devices have legitimate uses as a conduit for homebrew and backups. Being able to choose a game from a list that contains your entire library sure beats carrying a backpack full of cartridges around...

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[Tenebrousedge]

Well, I don't know anything about using R4 for pirating, but I do know that with the right homebrew software, the DS is a cheap portable art tablet par excellence.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[Sir_Dill]

Devils Advocate Fair use argument:

I have 10-15 DS games. Traveling with them is a real PITA. Either I am hauling around a manpurse or pockets full of cartridges.

The ARRRR4 would allow me to load all of my games to a single cartridge thus reducing the risk of theft, loss, or damage. Sure I can always lose it too but I find its generally easier to keep track of one thing, especially when that one thing "lives" in a larger one thing than it is to keep track of lots of little ones.

For the record I am not deluded. I know that one of the primary uses for these things is piracy, however that is not their ONLY use. Further arguments on that subject would be semantics.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[xtracto]

It is truly a case of fighting piracy. Anybody who thinks otherwise is severely delusional.

Wow, I feel personally offended by such comment.

I do develop homebrew programs for the DS. I am specifically developing a translator (based on the dicts.info dictionaries) using PAlib.

There are several *really good* homebrew apps for the Nintendo DS like Moonshell, DSOrganize or games like Lemmings (all the levels of lemmings for the DS, REALLY good). The DSLibris game is also a *very* good piece of software which allows you to read XHTML ebooks.

I am also in the process of doing a TIF image "reader", with the idea of converting PDF files directly to TIF multipage (monochrome for now...) via ghostscript and then being able to read them directly in the DS. This, after having played with the idea of porting xpdf or other programs... unfortunately the PDF and RTF are too complex for the tiny DS...

I don't have an R4 but a CycloDS Evolution and it is a really neat piece of technology.

So, as you can see, there are pleny of opportunities for a device like the DS. It is really a neat piece of hardware, and the touchscreen makes it more versatile.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[revlayle]

Not too much to afford.... too HEAVY, we're geeks, not body builders... sheesh!!

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[RyoShin]

I have to agree. On certain gaming boards/sites I visit with lax rules about content, it's not uncommon to hear people talking about their R4.

I can recall one time when someone asked about homebrew. This is contrary to the 500+ times someone has asked what games to load on it first (and sites to get them from).

I like the R4 as a product for convenience. I would love to be able to load up the info for my moderate-sized collection of GBA games (actual cartridges, not some ROM folder) and take them all with me in a convenient package. However, the primary use of the R4 is pirating and, as suggested by the OP, anyone telling themselves (or others) that the push against it is for its homebrew ability is delirious.

Honestly I'm surprised it took this long for Nintendo et al. to react. Though from what I hear, the R4 (and its close cousin, the M3) is on the way out and some other card with similar functionality is on the rise.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[Goaway]

While I'll agree, it is very dangerous to concede to the "It can be used for bad things... who cares about the legitimate uses".

I was taking no moral stand at all on its uses for any purpose. I was merely answering the silly question posed by the article: Whether Nintendo was suing to stop piracy or because it was afraid of homebrewers. The answer to that is blindingly obvious, no matter what you think of the worth of products like the R4.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[drcagn]

He never said that there wasn't any good homebrew on the DS. He said that the reason why Nintendo fighting the R4 is piracy.

I really doubt Nintendo would go this far over homebrew.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[xtracto]

Then you did not understand it. I'm sure you're doing all kinds of wonderful things with your R4,

haha
You really should read my post.

I don't have an R4 but a CycloDS Evolution and it is a really neat piece of technology.

:)
Other than that, yeah I guess I took it to personally. The bad thing about trying to take out R4 or any other similar card manufacturer is that they also hit us the homebrew developers :(

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[Hoknor]

Any amount of cartridge swapping creates new oppurtunity for misplacing of said cartridge. How many games does somebody need to own before it is considered an acceptably large amount of games that space saving is allowed?

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[jkerman]

So are blank DVD's then?

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[retroStick]

My company recently produced a single-purpose application for the DS, best described as a "virtual schedule" for a conference our client was holding. Since it was for a private customer as opposed to a retail application, we made it entirely using homebrew software and distributed it on M3 flash carts - almost identical to the R4 ones. Shipped about 1,500 of the things as I recall.

If those flash carts are now banned, I doubt there would be legal repercussions for our company distributing them - but the prospect of repeat business would be gone, and our months of development time on the application would suddenly become less valuable if not wasted.

Re:Well, that's an easy one to answer

[LordVader717]

Shitty games get pirated, but wouldn't have sold anyhow, and great games make tons of cash and are pirated by a small amount.

The shitt games sell alright, as they're usually the ones a parent buys for his kid.
The users who are prepared to spend 100$ or so to play pirated games OTOH will know better than to waste their time on shitty games. They're the ones who would buy the next installment of Final Fantasy because they want it, but would rather pirate it and save 30 bucks.
A freind of mine has 40+ PS2 games, most of them purchased at full price even. He didn't feel like modding his console and didn't like the idea of pirating tons of games anyhow.

He then bought a DS and a card reader and has yet to buy a single DS game, despite it being the only system he plays nowadays.
I think it's largely down to the fact that it's so fucking easy.

Re:What is the R4?

[digitrev]

Nintendo DS mod chip. Wired has a short blog post as well.

Re:What is the R4?

[digitrev]

Wikipedia link that I just bothered to look for.

Avoiding the pitfall of the PSP

[VoxMagis]

I just see this as Nintendo seeing what happened to the PSP and homebrew and getting it under control before it's too late.

It's sad - both systems should have some level of a 'code pack' that lets people write apps and such for their portable toys, but the level of flat piracy that the homebrew community has created for the PSP is really affecting it's viability as a game platform for developers.

http://www.pspfanboy.com/2008/03/09/ridiculous-psp-piracy-numbers/

Seriously?

[Robert1]

I can't tell if the article summary comment is tongue-in-cheek or actually serious. I should hope that it isn't the latter, its tough to believe people are really that delusional. How can a game written by 3-4 teen/early 20 year olds hope to compete against games that REQUIRE dozens of designers/artists? The cost and man-hours necessary to complete a modern game have effectively shoved small time developers out of business. Its not like they were muscled out, the technology and cost just ran away from them. Today, an amateur game maker can realistically hope to make games equivalent to those seen 15 years ago. How much market share will the 800th clone of pong or snake or RPG Maker-esque rpg really take away from licensed games? How fun is it, really, to play yet another generic 2d platformer?

Don't lie to yourself, nobody's clamoring to buy this to play any of those games. This is designed for piracy. I guarantee >95% use it exclusively for getting non-homebrew games.

Re:Seriously?

[kipman725]

you do know that you can play quake on a DS right?

Re:Seriously?

[Paralizer]

Don't lie to yourself, nobody's clamoring to buy this to play any of those games. This is designed for piracy. I guarantee >95% use it exclusively for getting non-homebrew games.

I suppose they should also sue anyone who makes the microSD cards since they are the medium stores any copyright code the R4 may use. Now let's expand that to include Sony, Maxwell, and all the other companies that make blank CD-R's and DVD-R's because they can be used to copy copyrighted material.

This is utterly ridiculous. The R4 is a development tool, if it can or can not run copyrighted code is irrelevant. I've had one of these things for a while and I have to say they are pretty awesome. (I'm a developer.)

These companies need to get over themselves and focus on making quality products consumers want to buy and stop blaming their shortcomings on piracy that only a tiny fraction of their potential customer base even abuse.

Re:What is the R4?

[Sir_Dill]

Technically its whats referred to as a flash cart.

The gist is that you load in the roms to flash memory and then insert the cartridge in your DS and then you can access and play the games as normal.

The R4 takes this a step further and allows you to use a microSD card.

While I think they have a case, the lack of action of previous iterations of flash carts might end up hurting them in the long run.

Big names are always making the same mistakes

[doyoulikeworms]

Bad move, Nintendo...

Re:What is the R4?

[neokushan]

It's one of SEVERAL different DS flash carts out there. Last I checked, there were at least 10, some of which are superior to the R4 in terms of functionality (they offer things like ingame cheats, ingame guides, even savestate functionality), just the R4 was one of the first of it's kind and thus the most well known of the bunch.
It's a futile attempt to curb piracy on the DS, most of the technology invovled in their making is public knowledge (in terms of "you can find most of it by googlong around", not in terms of "any average Joe knows it"), hell I'm sure I seen schematics on how to build your own - Nintendo taking down this one group wont stop anything.

It's akin to the MPAA shutting down a single torrent site - 5 more pop up in it's place almost overnight.

Re:A lot of homebrew games...

[neokushan]

A lot of DS games have the quality of an Atari 2600 game, same for the Wii. Doesn't mean some AWESOME ones don't exist out there as well.

Homebrew is wonderful

[PIPBoy3000]

I decided to get an R4 chip for our Nintendo DS. The kids love it, as I loaded it up with things like Colors!, which is a touch sensitive drawing program. It also nicely plays music and home videos. My kids were both mesmerized by family movies I took of them from a couple years ago.

There is a long list of homebrew software out there. And yes, you can even get your DS running Linux.

Re:A lot of homebrew games...

[spyrochaete]

DS homebrew isn't just about games. There are IM and IRC clients, many innovative music making programs that make interesting use of the stylus interface, remote desktop clients, demoscene productions, ereaders, web browsers, and even an FTP server. The DS is a great little platform with a zillion nonstandard uses that Nintendo will never be smart enough to sell.

There are TONS of homebrew apps for DS

[MobyDisk]

The Nintendo DS is homebrew heaven. There are dozens of mod chips for the DS. And many, many forums and libraries for homebrew applications. There's several development wiki's and some must have applications.

This is not a tool for piracy. If they want to stop piracy, they need to stop the people who are dumping roms. And you won't find tools to dump roms quite so easily. Attacking the companies that make legitimate devices lazy and anti-customer.

Re:They'll have to fight a hell of a lot of battle

[KGIII]

Because they only have to win one to get the rest to crumble more easily. They have very highly paid and very skilled legal and PR staff. They didn't bring this suit without reason and, most likely, have every expectation for a successful outcome.

My *guess* is that the outcome won't be making the product illegal, my guess is that they want some money for it and future versions will somehow make it more difficult (read: suck) to do what you want with them in the name of preventing piracy.

Re:What is the R4?

[Tacvek]

Indeed. The R4 was for quite a while the generally considered the best Slot-1 flashcard around. It was among the first cards to have near-perfect game compatibility, and it was low cost.

However, when the CycloEvo came out it replaced R4 as the slot-1 Flashcard of choice. When it first came out, it had the game support of the R4, but also had perfect Download Play (A.K.A. 1 cart multiplayer) compatibility. It also had support for SDHC microsd cards, which was a market first.

Both the R4 and CycloEvo support cheats. But the CycloEvo has an in-game menu feature to allow one to toggle cheats on and off, "Soft reset" (reset back to menu without cycling the DS power), and most recently, the ability To save or load a single emulator-like save-state. (Obviously it is slower than an Emulator's save-state, making it slightly less useful, but it still has uses).

The CycloEvo also has some of the best support of any flash card makers. They actually listen to people in their forums, reply to them, and have implemented multiple features by user request. They have also been known to ship replacements for defective units to the purchaser along with a cash refund for the shipping costs of returning the defective one. It does not yet have ingame guide support (unless a new firmware release has been made while I was not looking), but it is programed and slated for release in the next firmware update.

Now, the CycloEvo is probably still the Flashcard of choice, but it does have some serious competition, and may not remain that way for long.

Oh, I should mention that while this sounds like an advertisement for the CycloEvo, I'm not related to them in any way, and do not own that card. I in fact do not any DS flash cards (or GBA flash carts for that matter). However, I've been considering purchasing a FlashCart for a long time, and the CycloEvo is currently the one I plan to get.